Then he went out and run away from the refining influences of his beautiful home. He took to the hills and landed way up on the north fork of the Kulanche where Liver-eating Johnson has a sheep ranch. Liver-eating, who is an unsavory character himself, had once heard Shelley address a small group of critics in front of the post office, and had wanted to adopt him right there. He still cherished the fondest memories of Shelley's flow of language, so he was tickled to death to have him drop along and stop, seeing that though but a lad in years he was a man and brother in speech, even if he did look like a brother that had started out to be a sister and got mixed.
Liver-eating took him in and fed him and cut his hair with a pair of sheep shears. It was a more or less rough job, because shearing sheep does not make a man a good human barber by any means. But Shelley looked at his head in the glass and said it was the most beautiful haircut in the world. Fussy people might criticize it here and there, but they could never say it hadn't really been cut.
He was so grateful to Liver-eating that he promised to stay with him always and become a sheep herder. And he did hide out there several months till his anguished mother found out where he was. After having every pond dragged and every bit of woods searched for her boy's body she had believed he'd been carried off by kidnappers on account of his heavenly beauty, and she'd probably have to give ten thousand dollars for his release. She was still looking for a letter from these fiends when she learned about his being with Liver-eating Johnson and that this wretch had committed sacrilege on him.
It was a harsh blow to know that her pet had consorted with such a person, who was not only a sheepman but had earned his nickname in a way that our best people thought not nice. He'd gone home one day years ago and found his favourite horse had been took by an Injun. Being a simple-mannered man of few words, he just said that by sundown to-morrow he would of et the liver of the Injun that done the stealing. I don't know, personally, what happened, except that he did come back the next night with his horse. Anyway no one ever begrudged him his title after that. And here was Shelley Vane Plunkett, who had been carefully raised on fruits and cereals, taking up with such a nauseous character as a social equal.